So long PAB! Alberta restructures government communications, eliminates notorious Public Affairs Bureau

PHOTOS: Public Affairs Bureau Managing Director Corey Hogan during his days as a political commentator for CBC Calgary, shown in a screenshot of a CBC broadcast. Below: Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley and Conservative premiers Alison Redford and Jim Prentice.

A terse news release by the Alberta Government Wednesday announced that a significant shakeup of the government’s communications and marketing functions is set to take effect on Sept. 1.

The reorganization will consolidate all Government of Alberta communications and marketing operations “as a corporate service” that will now be found on the government’s organizational chart as a division of the Ministry of Treasury Board and Finance.

When the new structure goes into effect on the Friday before Labour Day, Alberta’s famous – or perhaps we should say infamous – Public Affairs Bureau will be no more, at least as an entity known by that notorious name.

At first glance, Communications and Public Engagement, as the unit of approximately 350 employees is to be known, sounds a lot like the Tory Era PAB, which was controversial for its size, power, budget and the sense among members of the public it had become thoroughly politicized.

But while the same claims will likely be made by Opposition politicians – viz., essentially the same people, albeit now operating under a new trade name, who benefited from the old PAB – supporters of the NDP Government of Premier Rachel Notley may be disappointed to learn this restructuring remains firmly within the tradition of a professional civil service and does not seem to be designed to play a partisan political role.

In other words, whether it is wise or not for a party with uninspiring polling numbers to behave responsibly, Ms. Notley’s NDP seems determined to continue to lead by good example.

“With our new model we are approaching the allocation of government communications resources differently,” said PAB Managing Director Corey Hogan, who expects to remain as Managing Director, Communications and Public Engagement.

“Prior to this reorganization the reality was that departments were not uniformly busy but had needed to keep bodies on hand for busy times,” he said yesterday. “Now, instead of staffing for peak load we will staff for base load and augment with swing capacity” – which is a fancy way of saying Treasury won’t overstaff departments but will send additional communications specialists hither and yon as they are needed.

“We need to be more efficient with resources and innovate in our approach to the delivery of services,” said Hogan, a former Alberta Liberal Party executive director and CBC Calgary political commentator who was appointed to the PAB job last October.

“Simply put, pure economics call into question having 23 communications branches and five marketing branches,” he said. The change will save about $4.5 million a year, roughly 15 per cent of the government’s communications budget.

“Our approach now will be to pool functions such as design, A/V, web and consultation, treating them as a corporate resource,” he explained. “This will mean better utilization and less reliance on outside vendors.”

Under Tory premiers Ralph Klein and Ed Stelmach, ministry communications directors served two masters. They were civil servants who managed the government’s communications departments and at the same time partisan political advisors whose job included helping the PCs get re-elected. Needless to say, one function strayed into the other from time to time.

To her lasting credit, that inherently conflicted blend of work was ended by PC premier Alison Redford, who implemented a system of press secretaries who are political appointees fulfilling the partisan role and communications directors who are members of the public service doing the public’s work. That separation of “church and state” has continued under the NDP.

Mr. Hogan said Communications and Public Engagement was placed under the Treasury Department because Treasury is also home to the Public Service Commission – in effect the government’s human resources department – so “it made sense to collect this new corporate service there as well.”

In that 2014 change, most communications employees were assigned to government departments and thereafter reported to deputy ministers, who are the senior civil servants in each ministry. Communications directors, assistant directors and branch staff became department employees, rather than part of the PAB. The PAB was reduced to a 40-member secretariat responsible for co-ordinating communications across departments.

At the time, there was speculation the Prentice Government’s shakeup – which deeply shocked PAB employees, who were not notified till a few hours before – was prompted by the PR disaster that that accompanied the Prentice Government’s decision to replace then Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman’s private member’s bill on gay-straight alliances with the government’s own legislation, which at that time didn’t require schools to permit students to form the GSAs if they wished.

Despite Mr. Prentice’s later capitulation on requiring schools to permit students to form GSAs on school property, for some reason the same issue continues to bedevil conservatives in the Alberta Legislature.

The name of the new division is very similar to that of a branch within the B.C. Government, although the structure of all Canadian government communications operations was surveyed and best practices were borrowed from several, Mr. Hogan said.

Sam Gunsch

July 28th, 2017

FWIW… re AB PC/conservatives control of media coverage of GoA policies… the view that Harper was the most intense communication control freak of modern conservatives that Canada has suffered under is mistaken. From my own first hand experience in the 90s on environmental files, I think Klein’s administration was the nastiest controlling communication team… Rod Love’s Machiavellian leadership was more destructive to having an informed citizenry or at least equal to Harper’s mode.

For example, if you didn’t have reason to follow politics closely in the 90s you might not have noticed or heard that journalists who reported stories that embarrassed the Klein PCs on environmental issues sometimes had their jobs threatened.

There was in fact, systemic intensive widespread control of GoA communications: one small example that illustrates the extreme control freak approach that was in place… the AB Parks newsletter about Natural Areas…e.g. before it could be printed, the AB Parks dep’t had to submit its Natural Areas newsletter to a GoA communication staff for a censor type of review before its few hundred copies could be sent out to the volunteer stewards of AB natural areas who generated the activities reported in this newsletter. All this newsletter did was go out to those few hundred AB citizens volunteering to monitor the condition of the couple hundred natural areas that, BTW, didn’t have much legal protection against damaging activities like OHV mud-bogging. But even that tiny publication had to be watched in case it revealed some story about the actual damage permitted by the Klein GoA’s lack of actual on-the-ground environmental protection.

IMO… most Albertans generally have very little knowledge of how much they’ve actually been kept in the dark about all sorts of public policy issues since Klein’s cabinet launched the corporate takeover of AB politics after Getty quit.

David Climenhaga

Pogo

July 28th, 2017

You know boss… I’m not getting any younger, and considering that some doddering ruin such as yourself could likely hand me my liver in a set to, I have to point out that you are now in the realm of this guy: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a56700/delaney-2020/ Who wrote, and I quote: “You can accept that political activism is a sucker’s game and give up, or wrap yourself in the robes of ideological purity as though they were suits of armor. Or, you can accept that political activism is a sucker’s game and then engage in political activism to make it less so. And, as I went back and forth between the Senate chamber and the South Lawn in the dark of the early morning on Friday, I thought a lot about Alaska.” You’re welcome!

Scotty on Denman

July 29th, 2017

Gordon Campbell’s first act as new premier of BC was to increase the premier’s office budget by eight fold and install about 250 staff—where about 30 did the job previously. It seemed so prescient and, sure enough, it foretold of abuses to come. Another Gordo invention, the BC Public Affairs Bureau and the “PABsters” who worked there, became such a butt of derision that Christy Clark, when she took over from her disgraced predecessor, changed its name.

The BC Liberals were notorious for hiding information, neglecting to record meetings about the public interest, triple deletion of government emails, frustrating of FOI requests and, most infamously, secret insider deals for which two BC Liberals (so far) were convicted of corruption in the sale of publicly owned BC Rail. More will be revealed as the new government continues to move ahead through assiduosly poisoned, tampered and boobytrapped books which the BC Auditor General condemned for every single year of the BC Liberal regime. It’s taken 16 years for self-satisfied West Coasters to realize the reason any government would want to interfere with access to public information is to hide things they wouldn’t approve of. With any luck we will be fully apprised sooner than later.

Obviously the PAB was not intended to inform, but rather to bafflegab the public with misinformation that concealed the real state of affairs. Otherwise, accessing public information, like applying for medical benefits or finding a campsite, is in BC like entering a Frank Kafka novel. The hope must have been to turn citizens off of asking.

Good luck to Alberta in this regard. It’s probably impossible to prevent subsequent governments from reestablishing an abuse-prone PAB, but, as we hope BC’s new NDP government will do, publishing examples of abuse by predecessors may help keep such bureaus and their administration within the conscious minds of voters when they decide which party they can trust.